As I scanned through my posts the other day, I realized that it has been more than a year since I have updated you all on our family of 6. I have time and time again written drafts of posts as I processed and contemplated sharing, but in my longing to protect Wei Wei’s story, to keep what he shares his own, I have struggled to find the boundaries. While we were going through the process of adoption, it was easy to protect his story. The process felt distant from the boy himself in many ways, and his life was yet intertwined with ours in any real way. But the longer he has been home, wholly our family, the harder it has been for me to write about adoption and parenting because his story and my story are now so connected. After being part of our family for two years now though, I have decided that it is important enough to me to write that I want to seek to find the line. I want to both preserve CJs story as his own and to share my own experiences and walk with God as a parent, both for myself and for others. (*Wei Wei now goes by CJ by his choosing when he started public school in the fall)
I have spent the last week looking through pictures from our time in Taiwan two years ago. I am thankful for journals and posts I wrote at the time because so much of my memory is tainted by the stress I remember of traveling and caring for Wei Wei who was in fight-or-flight mode a lot of the time once we had him with us. I am so thankful for the people who warned me ahead of time that travel would not be all that the sweet pictures of first-time meetings often show. They warned me that it might be great but it might also be survival mode in-country until we were able to settle at home. It was definitely some of both. I am still so thankful for all the one-on-one time we got with CJ in that first week with his sisters still back in Georgia. I have tried to focus back on the sweet things I remember from those days. The days at the orphanage when we played ball and cars for hours and drank bubble tea. The times in the hotel when CJ did hilarious dances to a Peppa Pig singing toys, and all the time I had to hold him and snuggle him and carry him everywhere.
He has been our son for two years now, and it is crazy to look back on photos from 2016 without him in them. The girls were both so little, but I wonder, if they looked back now, would they ask where CJ was? He is their brother through and through. They know he is adopted, but it is inconsequential most days, part of our family that is as normal to them as my having given birth to them. We talk often of where everyone in our family was born–Josiah, Lydia, and I in Illinois, Esther and Lazarus in Georgia, and CJ in Taiwan. But their origin stories are so remote to them, and they do not remember a time when the playroom wasn’t filled with cars alongside their baby dolls. So we don’t celebrate “Gotcha Days” or “Family Day” because that week in Taiwan was hard. For us, yes, but mainly for CJ in ways he may never remember. Rather than celebrate it in a way that might glorify losses while we also celebrate the making of a family, we just reflect on the wonder of his adoption often. Tonight as I kissed him before Josiah took him to lay him down for bed, I simply told him how special it was that we get to call him son and how thankful I am that he is now our family.
He has grown and changed so much in the last two years, and I am so thankful that God has seen fit for us to be evidence to that growth. At the same time he has changed us. I have appreciated all-the-more the adopting, never-giving-up, always and forever love of my heavenly Father as I have parented CJ. I thought the loving feelings would be what came easy, and I am sad to say that they haven’t always been. But that has only continued to remind me what love is, what God shows us love is through Christ. Love is laying down your life. Love is seeking others best, others first when you don’t feel like it at all, when it feels like death. Just as Jesus laid down his life to make us sons and daughters of the King. I hope CJ always knows that he has an Abba Father who will love him better than we can, and that we are forever thankful that he is part of our family and hope we can show him that never-stopping love everyday, even when it seems hard for him or for us.
The Grayt Adventure 